Fedora Games Spin : Requesting Board Approval

[Mike McGrath]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 21:10 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>   
>> We would like to request Fedora Project Board's approval on having this 
>> as part of the official release for Fedora 8 starting with test 3.
>>     
>
> Honestly?  I think it's too late for F8[1].  The other live images that
> are being done were pushed to have things that were testable for the
> feature freeze (test2).  This coming in at the last minute means that
> they're going to say why couldn't they wait.
>
> And really, there's something bigger here.  We need to be able to have
> groups (such as the Games SIG) able to create and build their own live
> images and make them available without requiring the overhead of 
> 1) Release engineering being involved to actually do the build[2]
> 2) Being able to do their own testing, etc.  As it is, Will can't try
> all the combinations of everything.  Adding more doesn't help.
> 3) Be able to have releases that aren't carried by all mirrors.  Because
> the explosion of images is going to be a lot of space on mirrors which
> isn't necessarily practical given how "popular" they are
>
> Also, we really need to be able to have a better way of guiding people
> to the best option for them to download...  with Fedora 7, things had
> enough confusion.  As we add more to the matrix, it only gets more so.
>
> Jeremy
>
> [1] At least, to have as a spin that's done by release engineering,
> carried by all the mirrors, etc.  I'd love to see it done, though, and
> have us solve some of the problems so that we can make it easier for
> groups to start up their own spins like this
> [2] I only scale so much.  Right now, Fedora 8 is already at twice as
> many live images to build and test as Fedora 7... and Fedora 7's number
> was plenty for one person
>   

I'd actually like to suggest we do the custom spins over torrents 
because it will allow us to judge some popularity and its a much lower 
barrier to entry.  I'm actually working to find some space dedicated to 
a more robust torrent server (possibly one with as much as 1T of space) 
which could make hosting that stuff much easier.

Also, I think custom spins don't need to follow the same guidelines as 
Fedora proper.  I don't know why, for example, a spin couldn't be 
released in the middle of a cycle.  The question of how something gets 
from the SIG to the torrent is still questionable in my mind.  I've not 
looked at wevisor that much but I know a web based version is being 
planned.  In the meantime perhaps they could work with the 
Infrastructure team once the spin has been approved until a permanent 
solution can be put in place?

My concern is that stifling the custom spins very early in life will 
dissuade others from participating.  Even if in the future a custom spin 
just becomes a set of default installed packages + cool custom theme, I 
think people will like that.  Though the question of QA is a good one.  
I've not looked at how customized (and therefore different) from Fedora 
a spin can get to the point where it'd need a separate QA path.

    -Mike